Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy Book

Cavanaugh's task is to develop a Eucharistic ecclesiology that leads the church to be "deeply involved in the sufferings of this world" as a "sharp discontinuity with the politics of the world" (13/14). To accomplish this, Cavanaugh names and critiques the normative ecclesiology of the Catholic church at large, social Catholicism, and in particular, its effects in Chile during the Pinochet regime. Social Catholicism was perpetuated largely by Catholic theologian Maritain and according to Cavanaugh was an "attempt to confine the church's activities to a putative 'social' sphere while vacating the 'political' sphere" (2). This particular ecclesiology ultimately "debilitated the church's ability to resist" the oppression of the Pinochet regime (2).
Cavanaugh begins by laying out the structure of his work and defining the realities of liturgy, eucharist, torture, social bodies and social imagination. He defines liturgy as an action by which a community becomes something together which they were unable to become as a group of individuals (12). Cavanaugh calls this community "social body" or the coordination of members into a single body with a unified shared performance (17). He goes on to elucidate torture and Eucharist through this lens of liturgy which constructs and sustains social bodies through dismembering or "re-membering". Using this lens, the Eucharist becomes the liturgy by which the members of the church are actualized into Christ's body and torture becomes a perversion that organizes bodies into a collective of suspicious individuals (12).
In section one, Cavanaugh goes to great length to illustrate the Chilean military regime's use of torture to dismember any social body who would pose a threat to its sovereignty (22). In section two, he describes how the church essentially forfeited social spaces to the state as a result of accepting Maritain's social Catholicism (122/123). Cavanaugh dedicates the second half of section two to the church's acceptance of the bifurcation of the spiritual and political spheres in Chile which eventually leads to the abandonment of citizen bodies to the state and the church's inability to resist the same (151).
In the third and final section of Cavanaugh's work, he suggests an alternative politic for the church through the acting out of the Eucharist. He begins his work by recalling the autonomy of the church and its legal separation from the state during the thirteenth century and a brief timeline of the church's gradual exodus from secular politics to the current political moment follows (219). Cavanaugh creates an ecclesiology and new politic around the liturgy of Eucharist which demands that we as the church participate in both the suffering of Christ and others. For Cavanaugh, the Eucharist is not just about symbol but the place where Christ embodies the church and moves us to praxis.
Western society is one in which "dis-membering" has been accomplished not through torture by the state but rather as a value promoted by culture. This book forced me to ask, "Has the privileged church of the West willingly adopted values that have essentially rendered us ineffective to resist any sort of future or current state sponsored oppression?" My answer is yes - we have become so obsessed with our individual rights and freedoms that we are blind to the plight of the marginalized who currently suffer under systems that are setup to further benefit the privileged. I highly recommend Cavanaugh's work as an important voice in one's formation of ecclesiology.